Growifier.com: Ploppable Residentials

[smf_16 1,835]

Hello everyone,

I've been quite busy last year, but I've always wanted to make my tool for modifying savegames a bit more accessible. I finally found some time and launched a website called growifier.com which is basically a nice interface around the growify command. You can simply upload an .sc4 file, the server will growify it and return the modified city as a download. This should make everything a bit easier to work with as nothing needs to be installed. Just visit growifier.com and that's it!

Running a website is not free of course and I'm not very keen on ads, so I've set up a way of accepting donations. The more I'll get, the more I'll be able to maintain the website obviously. 

On top of that, I would like to use this thread as a support thread where you can ask questions about the usage of the website. Let me know what you think!

- Seba

PS: Currently Chrome flags the generated .sc4 files as potentially dangerous. I'm working on this, but it looks like I'm subject to the grace of the Google Gods for now. If the warning bothers you, you can always use the link growifier.herokuapp.com. It's the same website, but for some reason it doesn't flag the downloads as potentially dangerous there. I guess it's related to the domain growifier.com being a relatively new domain. I requested a review from Google and they approved the website. No more warnings should appear. 

[Propfam 2,288]

Nice job! Not all people want to install npm. Even better is not even a single (meaningful) data being collected by the server! I think the UI should be adjusted to be a web app, rather than single-page website. But that's just my opinion, though.

[Flann 1,709]

Awesome work!  Makes me want to plop some Res!

[SIM-ple Jack 17,444]

Does this work only with Maxis lots, or custom content also? I've been working on a theory(with the assistance of Kaptain Kanga....I mean KloudKicker) that skewing time in the game will allow resident plopping. Am I warm as to what you did, or going down a blind alley?

[smf_16 1,835]

@SIM-ple Jack It works for all growable lots which are plopped using LotPlop or BuildingPlop, both Maxis and custom lots.

Interesting about the skewed time theory, how did you get to this? For all I know, it's the ZoneType that determines whether residents can find a way out of the building or not. If it's set to "Plopped", residents won't ever be able to find a way out (which makes sense, because plopped buildings such as landmarks aren't supposed to produce commuters). Perhaps that skewing the time might cause them not to become abandonend, but I would be surprised if this allows residents to actually find a way out. If you want to know more about the problem, I highly suggest you read through my topic on editing savegames.

 

[SIM-ple Jack 17,444]

21 hours ago, smf_16 said:

@SIM-ple Jack It works for all growable lots which are plopped using LotPlop or BuildingPlop, both Maxis and custom lots.

Interesting about the skewed time theory, how did you get to this? For all I know, it's the ZoneType that determines whether residents can find a way out of the building or not. If it's set to "Plopped", residents won't ever be able to find a way out (which makes sense, because plopped buildings such as landmarks aren't supposed to produce commuters). Perhaps that skewing the time might cause them not to become abandonend, but I would be surprised if this allows residents to actually find a way out. If you want to know more about the problem, I highly suggest you read through my topic on editing savegames.

 

I've been playing with building tiles completely made with Lot and BuildingPlop, without ever starting the city. The only drawback is the inability to draw streets/roads, so I've made some plop roads to keep up appearances. I usually play sandbox style, but I start the city to get a population in the region. You'll have some sort of pop before complete abandonment, by month 4. But ever since I started making my plop tiles, I've noticed the abandonment for-stalled to as long as 10 months. So I'm wondering if an entire city can be plopped, start the tile and the pop will stick around(of course, replacing the plop roads). KloudKicker even made some time mods, one of which runs the time in reverse. I'm still experimenting with them.

[monkeywater 910]

On 6/26/2021 at 4:37 PM, smf_16 said:

@SIM-ple Jack It works for all growable lots which are plopped using LotPlop or BuildingPlop, both Maxis and custom lots.

Will it convert custom lots only available as plop to growable?  Tons of ploppable industry out there that is only available as plop and would be nice if it made freight. 

[smf_16 1,835]

Yes, it works with custom lots as well, as long as it provides industrial jobs.

[smf_16 1,835]

Hello everyone,

Recently I have been thinking a bit about the future of the growifier.com website. Ever since I launched the website 1,5 years ago, I have not received a single donation, but the website is still costing me $7 a month + the domain name. This wasn't really viable anymore, but I also didn't want to shut down the website either.

As a solution, I have refactored the website to be a static website, meaning that the growification now happens on the client side, directly in the browser. This has the benefit that files no longer have to be uploaded to the server - which really speeds up things for your 50MB savegames - and it also allowed to me to reduce the costs of the hosting. As this is quite a radical change, it is possible that I introduced some bugs, so if you encounter any, just let me know. Happy growifying!

[deezedgod 177]

13 hours ago, smf_16 said:

Hello everyone,

Recently I have been thinking a bit about the future of the growifier.com website. Ever since I launched the website 1,5 years ago, I have not received a single donation, but the website is still costing me $7 a month + the domain name. This wasn't really viable anymore, but I also didn't want to shut down the website either.

As a solution, I have refactored the website to be a static website, meaning that the growification now happens on the client side, directly in the browser. This has the benefit that files no longer have to be uploaded to the server - which really speeds up things for your 50MB savegames - and it also allowed to me to reduce the costs of the hosting. As this is quite a radical change, it is possible that I introduced some bugs, so if you encounter any, just let me know. Happy growifying!

Nice! A lot of static hosts (e.g. Netlify) also give you a "domain" that isn't too bad (e.g. growifier.netlify.app). If you want to reduce costs even further, it's what I do for some side-projects.

[TheMurderousCricket 5,055]

@smf_16 Wow, I had completely no idea that such a thing exists but I can think of many situations where it could be really helpful to use your tool...

Like in all those situations in which you build a W2W chain and one of the lots refuses to develop into an anticipated building. 

The only concern I would probably have would be whether my city gets borked in the process or not as this is something I have never tried before. Oh well, I guess a backup is enough to solve the issue.

18 hours ago, smf_16 said:

Recently I have been thinking a bit about the future of the growifier.com website. Ever since I launched the website 1,5 years ago, I have not received a single donation, but the website is still costing me $7 a month + the domain name. This wasn't really viable anymore, but I also didn't want to shut down the website either.

Pardon my ignorance but can't you simply convert this tool into a .bat / .exe form, then, upload it here or to SC4D? This would eliminate the challenge and the costs you face of putting it up on the net.

[rsc204 21,808]

1 hour ago, TheMurderousCricket said:

Pardon my ignorance but can't you simply convert this tool into a .bat / .exe form, then, upload it here or to SC4D? This would eliminate the challenge and the costs you face of putting it up on the net.

I believe I asked this question myself once before, but never received an answer, I hope that you didn't infer the suggestion to be a criticism or anything like that. However, I am only too aware of the relative fragility of such projects relying upon some sort of server or internet-based service, the reality is that at some point, it probably won't be there anymore. Just considering for example all the image hosting sites that took down years of legacy posts, CJs/MDs and tutorials, which together were a huge loss for the community at large. Literally huge swathes of our history no longer exist and probably won't be recoverable, unlike sites with files that went offline, in these cases there is very little chance of ever recovering them.

I remember for example reading through Paeng's extremely popular CJ and using it as a source of inspiration for my own cities, then one day poof, it's all gone. In that case it was no one's fault, I know the hosting costs for Paeng were not cheap, he got sick and I even believe despite paying for an expensive plan he had to keep upgrading, his CJ was that popular around 2012-2014, the host changed the rules to prevent linking to images on forums and that was that. Since his illness he never returned to SC4, I think the images still exist, but finding a new host and then changing all the links would be a monumental task, I'm pretty sure it won't ever happen.

In this context, such a useful tool would have a more secure future were it simply a download anyone could make use of, because it really is a game-changer for those who want control of how their cities look, but wish to retain a functioning game. It would be a shame to have this functionality only to find one day it wasn't there anymore.

[smf_16 1,835]

7 hours ago, deezedgod said:

Nice! A lot of static hosts (e.g. Netlify) also give you a "domain" that isn't too bad (e.g. growifier.netlify.app). If you want to reduce costs even further, it's what I do for some side-projects.

Yeah I'm on Vercel now, which has a pretty generous free tier, so it's basically only the domain name now.

2 hours ago, TheMurderousCricket said:

Pardon my ignorance but can't you simply convert this tool into a .bat / .exe form, then, upload it here or to SC4D? This would eliminate the challenge and the costs you face of putting it up on the net.

Fyi, the tool is available as a cli on npm and the source is available on GitHub so even if the website was taken down, the tool wouldn't be lost. The website I made is just a wrapper around the cli as it is a bit more user friendly if you're not really used to using cli's.

 

2 hours ago, TheMurderousCricket said:

Like in all those situations in which you build a W2W chain and one of the lots refuses to develop into an anticipated building. 

The only concern I would probably have would be whether my city gets borked in the process or not as this is something I have never tried before. Oh well, I guess a backup is enough to solve the issue.

Of course backups are always a good idea, but the tool has been around for some time now (see the topic below for some history) and there haven't really been any bug reports for it so I'd say it's pretty safe to use. I'd recommend testing it out for the first time on a new city though.

 

1 hour ago, rsc204 said:

In this context, such a useful tool would have a more secure future were it simply a download anyone could make use of, because it really is a game-changer for those who want control of how their cities look, but wish to retain a functioning game. It would be a shame to have this functionality only to find one day it wasn't there anymore.

I understand, but as mentioned it's available as a cli on npm and the code on GitHub, so even if the website goes down, it'd still be available. The benefit of having it on a website is also that it's always up to date. With an experimental tool as this, this feels safer as critical bugfixes are immediately available. I feel that it's not mature enough to truly release it as a download somewhere.